If you’re editing a news site, are you publishing what users want or what you have?

Assuming you have what users want, are you organizing it the way your users would want it organized? Or is it organized based on some legacy notion like print sections? Or worse, is it displayed based on the org chart?

Startup news sites are fighting an uphill battle against established media brands. But one advantage they have is the ability to put the user first in their content and layout decisions, without the burden of prior procedures.

I only need to look at the increase of twitter followers, new blogs and fresh faces that have appeared since christmas to know that journalists are really fired up about online. They love twitter and blogging and RSS. Once they get excited by slideshows or video or maps they want to try them. The avalaunche of new apps that appear on the web news of which spread through their newly followed feeds appear as a tweet are the biggest most exciting toy box imaginable. They have stories they want to tell.

Then they go in the office and it grinds to a halt.

That great stuff they tried on their blog the night before needs a form signed in triplicate, a request to central support and good dollop of patience. By then the stories dead and a little bit of the excitment has died with them.

Things were simpler a decade and a half ago, when the three daily newspapers that landed on my doorstep (all paid for) were what I needed.

Not any more. For any given story, other than perhaps the truly local, there are dozens of sources and there’s no single source that covers it best day in and day out. When I’m following a story, I’ll go through as many as a dozen websites and, for different stories, they are not always the same ones.

I’m hardly unique. Increasingly, it’s the way people inform themselves. And that’s where part of the idea of paying for the news breaks down substantially. How many subscriptions should have to I buy to cover the part-time creation of value?

As newspapers struggle to sell their content, which in most cases can be found online for free, David Carr of The New York Times asks why the news industry as not followed Apple’s model for iTunes.

The iTunes online music store sold more than 2.4 billion tracks last year, according to the NYT. The most important thing to retain from this number, according to Carr, is that “Apple has been able to charge for content in the first place,” even though music can be downloaded for free online (illegally, of course).

Their success is a combination of an easy user interface, cooperation within the music industry and a solid business model. The question is can the model be transplanted?

If you run a website you’re going to want to manage your content. You might use an Enterprise CMS, an open source CMS, a blogging platform or a bespoke app, and as you might expect at the BBC the same rules apply. Except some of us have been trying out something a bit different — using the web as a content management system.

5. That churnalism is much easier to spot online. If you do this regularly, your readers are already on to you – merely re-writing press releases without bringing anything to the table no longer cuts it.

Before you read any further, you need to know that I am a strong supporter of the Palestinians who thinks the state of Israel is an imperialist construct and an outpost of American projected military power in the Middle East. I’ve come to the conclusion that journalists have a moral responsibility to say as much and to predicate all their reporting of the current Gaza conflict, as well as coverage of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and the associated “terror frame” of news analysis on this controversial starting point.

In other words, I believe in what Martin Bell calls the “journalism of attachment”, rather than feeble attempts at objectivity, which is, in and of itself, a form of inbuilt and largely unconscious bias.